Inspired Strategies for your Creative Calling

Obstacles and Adversity

now browsing by category

So, my current day job is being a part-time sales associate at a medium-box retail store.

Today about 40 minutes before the end of my shift the power went out. It roared back to life a minute later, but the registers all took a good 10 minutes to come back online. No biggie, and it was a slow day and all the all the customers in the store had been there during the power outage, so they knew why there was a delay and they were all pretty cool while we all stood thee and waiting for the computers to deign to work again.

Five minutes before the end of my shift, the power went down again; this time it did not come back. So, we all went into emergency mode, quietly herding the remaining customers out to the front of the store and putting their goods on hold for them so they can come and pick them up tomorrow.

Once everybody was out, then it was time for us to sit and wait. The manager, of course, already phoned her superiors to let them know what was happening, as well as phoned to try and get information from the power company – who had no idea about anything.

You wouldn’t know it from a surface glance: I seem to be busy enough and therefore productive enough, but that’s just because you haven’t seen the list of all the things I want to be doing but haven’t gotten around to.

Or the spare bedroom in my house turned super-sized junk drawer that I haven’t gotten around to tidying yet.

Or trail of half finished projects, books, songs, paintings…

And of course the busy-ness itself is part of the problem. Here’s what I’m currently up to: